ENHANCEMENT AND SMOOTHING OF HYPERSPECTAL REMOTE SENSING DATA BY ADVANCED SCALE-SPACE FILTERING

While hyperspectral data are very rich in information, their processing poses several challenges such as computational requirements, noise removal and relevant information extraction. In this paper, the application of advanced scale-space filtering to selected hyperspectral bands was investigated. In particular, a pre-processing tool, consisting of anisotropic diffusion and morphological leveling filtering, has been developed, aiming to an edge-preserving smoothing and simplification of hyperspectral data, procedures which are of fundamental importance during feature extraction and object detection. Two scale space parameters define the extent of image smoothing (anisotropic diffusion iterations) and image simplification (scale of morphological levelings). Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed scale space filtering for the enhancement and smoothing of hyperspectral remote sensing data and their advantage against watershed over-segmentation problems and edge detection.